Art, Geeks, and Power Ploys: How to Build your Intranet

by David Strom (appeared in Forbes ASAP, 8/96)

If you are about to begin your first Intranet project, you need to gather
together people of diverse skills: computer geeks, artists, diplomats,
and negotiators. It seems like a motley crew, but you'll need these diverse
talents, along with some careful choices in hardware and software, if you
will be successful.

Before you get started collecting your renaissance crew together, you
should first narrow your focus and pick your first project carefully. Intranets
can cover the enterprise or focus on particular workgroups, and run the
gamut from publishing applications to more traditional groupware-style
discussion tracking. They can cover inward-looking applications of various
Internet technologies such as the worldwide web, email and Usenet news
groups, and run on a wide variety of operating systems and servers. And
you'll need both technical and artistic help to handle the myriad of details.

"Most managers might not know that Intranets have three big advantages,"
says Greg Hubbard, a senior systems fellow at SHL Systemshouse, Dallas
TX, "You only have to publish things in one place, everyone can get
to your information no matter what kind of machine they are using, and
you can get the tools for next to nothing if not completely free."

Even though Intranets are the buzz word of the year, they still may
be a tough sell for some managers. "Some of them think Intranets are
a waste of time, or else they think they are so easy to setup that no extra
resources are necessary," says Adam Kuhn, a senior LAN analyst did
for the trade association Edison Electric Institute (EEI), Washington DC.

"It is hard to justify a return on any Intranet investment, but
this was the case ten years ago when we were trying to justify email. No
one could project any hard cost savings, yet nowadays few organizations
would be willing to throw out their email systems and go back to printing
memos," says Hubbard.

Do you want to save money by publishing something that frequently changes
yet that everyone needs access to, such as a corporate phone book or policy
manuals? Marc Dodge, a telecom systems manager for United Parcel Service,
Mahwah, NJ has put together a project for 40 sales executives there: "they
have access to corporate presentations as soon as they are posted on-line."
Hubbard wrote an application that allowed anyone to search their internal
corporate phone book. "This ability to write your own applications
is a real diamond in the rough, and that there is a lot of potential with
Intranets to facilitate information integration," he says.

Bryan Bredehoeft, a senior business consultant, Kraft Foods, Glenview,
Ill. feels that "Intranets provide for cheap, rapid, and easy alternative
methods of information delivery that used to be expensive and slow -- this
means Intranets can't help but save our company money. You can also track
your own hits and determine what information is important to your own people."
This feedback mechanism makes Intranets both valuable and unique: imagine
trying to get the same level of interest from your average corporate paper
memo.

Sometimes the project can be more modest, such as designing a default
corporate home page that Kuhn did for EEI: "The page gets loaded every
time one of our users brings up Netscape, and has popular search sites
along with business-specific sites for our staff. We wanted something that
could help newbies learn about the web and reduce our own help-line support
calls."

Sometimes the advantages can be rather compelling, and once you get
beyond the first project, subsequent Intranet efforts are often easier.
With Bill Dinner, vice president at ESI Securities, Inc., New York NY "it
was amazing how quickly our the list of Intranet applications grew: overviews
of all the projects that were in development; contact lists and our corporate
phone directory, the establishment up various research-based systems, publication
of project reports and internal news groups. The Intranet became a required
tool that saved time and energy. We were able to work smarter not harder."

While many pundits have made the Intranet and the web synonymous, that
doesn't have to be the case. Sometimes, Intranets can be formed around
more group collaboration projects, such as sharing progress reports and
discussions. A number of tools are available for this purpose, including
traditional groupware products such as Attachmate's Open Mind and Lotus
Notes, along with Usenet-style news servers including various Unix and
NT-based products from Netscape Communications Corp., Frontier Technologies
Corp., and Netmanage, Inc.

Ward Mundy, as MIS Director of Atlanta-based US Court of Appeals, found
his first Intranet application moving in this direction, where summaries
of law review articles are shared among 500 judges and their law clerks
to help them keep current. "I think the web is great as a publishing
tool, where we can put all our court decisions in one place at one time
and not have to fiddle with them again. But as something to share information
and build a central repository where you want broad participation, it has
a long way to go to being a turnkey groupware application. Open Mind allowed
us to do all the web publishing plus give us the groupware part as well."

Another application is to tie together far-flung workgroups by offering
a common place that team members can go to monitor progress on their joint
projects. "We have several staff that are located outside of NY headquarters
as well as several consultants that work strange hours," says ESI's
Dinner. "The Intranet will allow us to keep track of projects and
encourages discussion on the systems we are developing." Realize that
the core of any successful Intranet is the ability to transport data efficiently
across the enterprise. "A good solid way to build the database connection
is the most important item missing from current Intranets. Most of the
database products available are very immature," says Dinner. Therefore,
before you get involved in any Intranet effort, first tabulate where your
data is coming from and in what format or formats it exists. Then look
carefully at those products that claim to work in these formats.

Who is in charge of the project? Figuring out the kind of skills for
a project leader can be difficult. Hubbard feels that artists should be
Intranet project leaders. "The temptation is to strong to put a senior
geek in charge and let him call the shots, but you really need an artist
in charge of any Intranet project. As computer scientists, we like to think
of our work as 'art' but I doubt any of it will make it to the Louvre.
A successful Intranet team needs the left-brain types and the right-brain
types, and someone to help them get along with each other."

Realize that often the best Intranet projects cut to the core of corporate
turf battles, so deciding on who takes ownership over the project may be
a tough fight. "People are not anxious to post information that might
get into the wrong hands, especially for the department down the hall,"
says Hubbard.

And, often an Intranet project can be a fight for Information Systems
group to regain control over developing new systems: "Whether or not
IS owns the Intranet can be a difficult issue," says Kuhn. Part of
the problem is how Intranets are perceived in various different departments:
"The Intranet is an organism that creates joy for users, concern for
marketing and sheer terror for telecom and IS departments," says Dodge.

Do you have to connect everyone in your company with TCP/IP [transmission
control protocol/Internet protocol]? It helps. Intranet technologies are
based on TCP/IP, and if you haven't deployed this protocol to every desktop
yet, you may want to think carefully about doing so. One way to make the
transition is to do what EEI did -- they started out by using a gateway
than run TCP/IP on their NetWare servers: "We did not want to put
TCP/IP on every single workstation and Firefox's Novix software allows
you to avoid just that. By not having to manage IP addresses, we've saved
a major headache and memory on our already crammed workstations,"
says Kuhn.

Others realized quickly that they would need to deploy TCP/IP to every
desktop to support Intranet applications. "While we started out without
having TCP/IP everywhere, by the end of the summer we intend to have TCP/IP
on every desktop. Moving data from our Novell LANs to TCP/IP on our wide
area networks has been painful," says Mundy. John Dubiel, the manager
of planning for Boston (Mass.) Edison, agrees: "Learn how to manage
TCP/IP before you deploy any Intranets."

New technologies from Microsoft and others called Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol can manage frequently-changing desktops and can help deploy TCP/IP
across the enterprise. This comes included as part of Windows NT and new
versions of Novell's NetWare servers. "With these technologies now
available for Windows and rapidly being adopted by the industry, TCP/IP
is significantly easier to roll out. When we started we had all sorts of
problems bridging TCP/IP to other protocols," says Bredehoeft.

What kind of servers should you use for your Intranet project? You'll
need to carefully match your needs with what is available, but many companies
are looking towards servers running either a version of Unix or Microsoft's
Windows NT. The major difference is the expected load on the servers themselves
and the kinds of tools available to create your content: while Unix is
the more capable choice in both respects, NT may be more than adequate
for smaller-scale projects.

"NT is clearly our server of choice -- it makes things easier to
have a single platform for file and print, database, and web services.
Plus, the NT versions of database servers are much cheaper than corresponding
Unix versions. However, NT is not totally ready for prime time: Unix is
easier to administer and manage in a large network and NT is not as stable
for mission critical tasks," says Dinner. United Parcel's Dodge is
using Unix as well, "mainly because it provides the best tools."

What about Apple Macintosh-based servers? "A customer thought that
a Macintosh-based solution was cheaper, but the savings disappeared when
we factored in all the extra labor we would need to make up for the lack
of management tools in the Apple environment. If all you need is a simple
Web site, anything will do the trick. Sophisticated needs require more
horsepower and better tools," says Hubbard, who is using Unix-based
servers.

Remember: the incremental approach often works best. Do lots of quick
prototyping. "Document everything. Start small and then grow,"
says Dodge. "Put the basic Internet tools (email, web, news) into
the hands of end users and provide some basic training and let them decide
how to exploit these services," says Dubiel.

Kraft's Bredehoeft agrees: "Intranets are an iterative process.
Start developing and modify where necessary. And you will modify!"

Sometimes the job isn't done even after an application is finished,
according to Hubbard: "It is a struggle for people to stay motivated
after their Intranet site is built and they go back to their real day jobs.
People lose interest in static and stale sites. An organization has to
make a commitment to keep their Intranet sites up to date, or they will
just drift away into irrelevance."